The euphoria of winning the Rugby World Cup has been rapidly replaced by a different competition. In our regular bipolar fashion much of the public mood has swung back to deep gloom over the state of the economy, markedly with the strike at the national airline. The result is yet another blame game, so it’s worth recalling the chorus of the old rugby song: “It’s the same the whole world over/It’s the rich what gets the pleasure/It’s the poor what gets the blame.”
Adapted from a 19th-century English musical hall ditty (“She was poor, but she was honest”), it reflects a fairly universal injustice. But in 21st-century SA, one of the most unequal societies in the world, it must be particularly galling for low-paid workers to be lectured by highly paid executives and mainstream economists about a lack of patriotic feeling and union greed. The mess at SAA has been caused by years of chronic mismanagement and the by now standard board-level looting.
Workers might be more receptive to sanctimonious sermons were there the slightest indication of action against former SAA chair Dudu Myeni. With help from higher up, she leeched the airline dry. Evidence at the Zondo state capture commission indicates that Myeni was also receiving R300,000 a month from Bosasa to pass on to then president Jacob Zuma. Our rusty wheels of justice may grind exceedingly slowly, but if SAA goes bust, is it really the fault of workers rather than Zuma, his ministers, Myeni, board members and executives?
The ruinous financial strain caused by state-owned enterprises, primarily Eskom and SAA, threatens the country’s ability to develop the economy and provide a greater safety net for the unemployed and very poor. But the easiest targets, in extremis, are usually ordinary workers. Well-heeled commentators regularly expect foot soldiers to pay the price of leadership criminality. Thus some ministers and top ANC leaders, alongside those in the private sector who acted as their facilitators and benefactors, qualify through corruption and incompetence for the refrain, “It’s the rich what gets the pleasure”, but that merely reaffirms the song’s bitter riposte, “It’s the poor what gets the blame.”
Such an off-key tune has long been the theme song of most orthodox free marketers, and not only in SA. But here that argument is particularly self-satisfied from well-heeled white commentators who inherited much of their own assets from an infamously unfree apartheid economy.
A useful phrase has been coined to articulate the nub of global warming: colonising the future. This conveys how the majority of adults in the current generation consume most of the essential resources that might have been expected to be available for the next generation. The grim inventory of the high cost of our present consumption includes such basics as clean air and fresh water. A similar ethos was the essence of colonialism: the enjoyment of assets by a small elite, indifferent to the predicament of the less powerful — despite the fact that it was, of course, the exploited who produced by their sweat the very resources from whose enjoyment they were largely excluded.
Sociologists make a distinction between economic and social capital. The industrialised world places a strong emphasis on making and banking money. In more rural societies, social capital is at a premium: investing in reciprocal relationships and a network of favours, which will be repaid at a time of need. SA is now split between the impersonal transactions of modern commerce as against the expectations of more traditional ways. It makes for an uneasy coexistence, which regularly leads to misunderstanding and strife.
This gap in understanding is worsened by the fact that the discrepancy often remains one of colour, with most whites schooled to the industrialised approach. Today, with old and new elites uniting to blame workers for our economic woes, this consensus fails to take account of social capital. With an unemployment rate which in a more developed economy would precipitate acute social conflict, if not revolution, it is an extremely blinkered assessment.
Neither the workers nor unions are colonising our future. It is rather the present form of unbridled consumerism, now questioned even by the Financial Times, which is leading to ever-increasing inequality. So as the rich still get the pleasure, and the poor most of the blame, the old music hall song, adapted more rudely by rugby players, concluded ruefully: “Ain’t it all a bloomin’ shame?”
• Rostron is a journalist and author of Robert McBride: The Struggle Continues.
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